Tuesday, June 19, 2012

Today was my last day at Schleupen AG. I worked there for 5 years as an enterprise developer mainly on back end and algorithmic topics, but also on the front end with .NET, Silverlight and more. We developed some really nice things there and I'm esp. proud of the parallel data processing pipeline which even works with .NET 2.
My co-workers were a great bunch of people, some became my friends and even the godfather of my youngest daughter and I became a godfather too. I thank them all for what I've learned and the great time we had. I wish them nothing less than the best for their future.

It's an exciting time to be a developer with so much things happening in this industry at the moment. Microsoft's own Surface tablets is just one piece we as software developers can leverage to shape the future. For me it's good fun to use these great new technologies like Windows Phone, Windows 8, WinRT, .NET, DirectX, XBox, Kinect, etc. to create nice experiences and I love to work on this all the time.
A few months ago I got an offer from IdentityMine and if you know their work, you can imagine that it was a no-brainer to accept this nice offer they made me. I'm really looking forward to work with state of the art technologies on exciting projects with experts like Laurent Bugnion and more great people. Another nice aspect of my new gig: I will work from my home office and will be closer to my 3 lovely daughters and wife. I will also be here during the last phase of my wife's pregnancy and can hopefully support her better. And yes, we're expecting our fourth child in September. :-)

Now I will enjoy a couple of days off with my family until I start my new job as Senior Interactive Developer at IdentityMineon July 2nd.

Thursday, June 14, 2012

After a few preview versions, I'm happy to announce that the final version of WriteableBitmapEx 1.0 is now available.
A couple of weeks ago we added official WPF support and WinRT Metro Style support. With that WriteableBitmapEx is now available for 4 platforms: WPF, Silverlight, Silverlight for Windows Phone and Metro Style WinRT .NET.You can download the binaries here or via the NuGet package. Thepackages contain the WriteableBitmapEx binaries. All samples and the source code can be found in the repository.

Since the last WinRT preview version, a new WinRT sample was added, a couple of bugs were fixed and a new FromStrean method was added which loads an image stream into a WriteableBitmap. The project was also updated for the Windows 8 Release Preview. Please read this blog post for more details (about the WinRT version).